Category Archives: News

This year the annual Heliconius 2014 meeting will be hosted by the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras campus from June 4th to June 6th. The meeting will be immediately prior to the SMBE meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico (http://www.smbe.org/).

You can find a brief description of the Heliconius 2014 meeting at the following webpage: http://heliconius.wix.com/heliconiusmeeting

Please register using the form found on the website (http://heliconius.wix.com/heliconiusmeeting).

Breakfast and lunch will be provided for the three days of the meeting and special rate at the UPR housing ($50 per night) will be offered by request (see form on the webpage) to the participants. Possibility to extend the stay at the University housing will also be offered to the participants if requested (especially for the ones that will present at the SMBE meeting).

This may be a dangerous thing to say, but things seem to be going well with our planning for the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition this year, which will be held from 30 June until 6 July. We were selected from many applicants, and will be among ~20 stands from all aspects of UK science. The exhibition attracts around 12,000 visitors during the week ranging from school groups, general public through to the FRSs.

We have now raised almost £20K from a wide variety of sources, including significant contributions from the Herchel-Smith Fund and the Department of Zoology in Cambridge. There is still a small shortfall on our anticipated budget, but we will certainly be able to do most of the things we had planned. We have also assembled a great team to support us including Natasha Jarvis (filmmaker), Dave Griffiths (computer game), Mark from Cambridge Design Studios (exhibit design). Several of these projects are now well underway.

We want to invite anyone else who works on Heliconius to come along – it should be a great opportunity to talk about what we do to a receptive audience. We cant pay for travel but may be able to provide accommodation in a shared house that we will rent for the week in London. Do let us know if you are interested.

We have been chosen to present a stand at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in July this year. We will be presenting our work on butterfly wing patterns and genomes to over 10,000 people including the press and the Fellows of the Royal Society.

Right now we have lots of ambitious plans including a video about the work, with footage from field trips to Panama and Surinam. A computer game that includes aspects of wing pattern genetics and something about mimicry selection. A cage with live butterflies. And an exhibit with some of Bates’ original correspondence with Darwin on the subject of mimicry and speciation.

My lab has recently started a new initiative called JournalPub! (I believe the exclamation mark is essential). The idea is that this is a weekly event and anyone interested goes to the pub to read and discuss a classic or important paper. So far its been focussing on the Heliconius literature, although it needn’t be restricted to that. The difference from a typical journal club is that there is no expectation to attend if you dont want to read the paper, and that you dont have to read anything before turning up. Oh, and there is beer available at the bar. A further development is that we hope to write a short post about each paper on this blog, to start to generate an annotated list of some interesting or important Heliconius literature.

I am quite familiar with the paper already, since it was fairly recently published when I started my graduate studies with Jim in 1993. He had spent over a year living in Peru with a battered LandCruiser, translocating butterflies across a hybrid zone in order to measure selection in the wild. The essence of the experiment is that butterflies were translocated, marked and released. Controls were moved to a population in which they had the same wing pattern as the local butterflies, while experimentals were moved a similar distance but into a population with a very different wing pattern. So-called Native Controls were locally marked and released back into their own population. A likelihood approach (calculated manually in those days) was used to fit two parameters – a probability of establishment and a subsequent probability of survival. The Experimentals had a greatly reduced probability of establishment as compared to controls, but subsequent survival was similar for both. This suggests an initial strong burst of predation soon after release. Possibly the birds are likely to attack novel patterns at first but there are only a few predators in the local area and they soon learn the novel pattern also.

The paper also discussed alternative explanations for thre reduced survival of experimentals – notably some other form of local adaptation unrelated to wing pattern. Translocation distance had no effect on survival arguing against this explanation although it is hard to rule out completely. The authors say in the discussion that ‘..it would be perverse to assume that selection due to predation is unimportant.’ – thats perhaps over-egging the pudding a bit, but perhaps a little bit of frustration with reviewers was showing through at this point.

The paper was important, as it still stands as perhaps the best experimental demonstration of mimicry selection in the wild and provides an explanation for the stability of narrow wing pattern hybrid zones in Heliconius.

When things were going badly in the field, I was always inspired by Jim’s story of this experiment – having spent six months collecting data he was disillusioned and depressed about the lack of significant results. Nick Barton, like the messiah of evolutionary biology, came down to visit. On a pocket calculator he worked out a likelihood model and showed that the experiment was significant. Time for a bottle of Cusquenya?

After our recent successful Consortium meeting in Harvard, I though I would post some information about the history of these meetings. Robert Srygley organized the First International Heliconius Congress, as a symposium under the auspices of the Association of Tropical Biology. The ATB meetings in 2000 were held together with the SSB/SSE/ASN Meetings at Bloomington, Indiana. Thanks to Jim Mallet for digging out the schedule:
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The next meeting was a two-day event in Panama held on 3-4th August 2002, organised by myself and Robert Srygley. Here are a couple of the group photos and the programme (thanks to Larry Gilbert for the photos).

Field trip to Pipeline Road – Robert Reed, Larry Gilbert and Chris Jiggins

The father figures – Keith Brown and Larry Gilbert
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The next meeting was in 2004 in Puerto Rico, organised by Owen McMillan. I dont have a schedule of the talks, but here is a schedule of events and a receipt, just so you can see the conference logo.ConferenceSchedule1.0

H. melpomene laying an egg on its Passiflora menispermifolia hostplant

Unlike their male counterparts, female Heliconius butterflies have taste receptors on their legs in order to pick the best plants on which to lay their eggs.

Female Heliconius butterflies have taste receptors next to spikes on their legs in order to spear and ‘taste’ plants to find the most beneficial ones on which to lay their eggs, new research reveals. As male Heliconius butterflies do not lay eggs, they have no taste receptors on their legs. The research was published today, 11 July, in the journal PLoS Genetics.

For the research, the scientists studied the genes that code for the taste receptor proteins. Using new high-throughput sequencing methods, they were able to identify genes expressed at very low levels, including the great diversity of taste receptor genes unique to female Heliconius butterflies.

Because, unlike their parents, caterpillars cannot fly away to find a more suitable plant, it is imperative that the female butterflies choose the best host plant for their eggs or risk the survival of their offspring. The proteins that are coded for by the taste receptor genes enable the female butterflies to identify the most advantageous plants on which to lay their eggs.

Dr Chris Jiggins, lead author of the paper from the University of Cambridge said: “It appears that a new set of taste receptor genes have evolved to help identify toxic plants and are used by females to find the plant that will increase their caterpillars chance of survival.”

It is a long-standing hypothesis that butterflies are so diverse partly because of the complicated evolutionary arms race with the plants that their larvae eat – as plants develop new ways to prevent being eaten, butterflies develop new ways to eat plants.
For example, Heliconius butterflies evolved in a way that allows them to feed on the highly-toxic, cyanide-containing leaves of passion flower vines.

The Heliconius butterflies have not only evolved to overcome the plant’s defences, but can now even synthesise their own cyanide-containing compounds that protect them from predators.

Thanks to everyone who came to the Consortium meeting in Boston. It was a great success with lots of exciting biology and some rather arcane discussions of databasing problems. Thanks in particular to Bill Gelhart and others from FlyBase who came along to give advice, and Jim Mallet and Nikki Hughes for organising and hosting us. Here is the group photo and a list of everyone who attended.

This is to announce that there will be a meeting of the Consortium on July 12-13 in Cambridge Mass. organised by Jim Mallet. Please contact Jim if you would like to attend.

This will be the first meeting since we published the genome paper last year, and the goal is to start the ball rolling for the future – in particular which genomes should we sequence next, how will we deal with databasing and data sharing issues in the era of multiple genomes, and in general to promote discussion about ongoing projects in all the Heliconius labs.

This morning there was a great article in the NY Times about the history of mimicry research and recent discoveries in Heliconius by Sean Carroll, the evo-devo guru. A great pat on the back for the whole Heliconius community!

It has recently been remarked that the phnomenon of mimicry extends to the biologists that study Heliconius. It remains unclear whether this convergence at a phenotypic level involves a common genetic basis. Here are a few examples.

Patricio Salazar, who works on hybrid zones and hybridisation and Arnaud Martin, who works with the evolutionary developmental biology of wing patterns.

Robert Reed, Professor at Cornell working on many aspects of Heliconius biology, and Richard Wallbank, recently recruited to butterflies from the world of the fruit fly.

And finally, Keith Willmott, author of upcoming Butterflies of Ecuador, and Andrew Nield, author of the Butterflies of Venezuela.

Suggestions for any more instances of this phenomenon would be gratefully accepted.